Whatever you tweet may be used against you | Hacker News Reader

Whatever you tweet may be used against you

economist.com

"Why do tweets keep undoing people? The answer may lie in their hybrid nature. In form, the language of social media is written—but in style, it is far more like speech."

I understand where the author is coming from in asserting that informal speech is being judged like writing. However, I think the answer lies in the fact that there is a sizeable number of people who actively want to take down anyone they deem problematic and short tweets just happen to be great fodder for this. Tweets being simple and conversational is secondary to wanting to cancel someone for having expressed problematic things. The online mob can easily dismiss context and extenuating circumstances regardless of the medium.

But... why does anybody listen?

Does a mob need to be nuanced? All they need is an excuse and Tweets provide their righteous selves all the reason and pols and companies have a tool to use to their advantage.

For as dynamic and complex a situation as humans on an internet, there is some underlying assertion in cancel culture that people are intellectually immutable and incapable of change.

In contrast with physical aspects like gender, sexuality, and, occasionally, race.

Whether this cultural direction proves fruitful in the mid- to long-term remains to be seen.

> In form, the language of social media is written—but in style, it is far more like speech."

I don't think that's quite it. The problem is that tweets are are almost completely context-free.

Tweets are a complete, self-contained, little statements utterly devoid of context that supporters and detractors alike can read almost anything into.

Tweets are a cypher. If one triggers a response in us, there is nothing to indicate that our first impression is not absolutely correct.

> "Tweets feel like conversation but are judged like writing"

> "Why do tweets keep undoing people? The answer may lie in their hybrid nature. In form, the language of social media is written—but in style, it is far more like speech."

This sounds fine as a first hypothesis, but I think it can be rejected pretty quickly, based on the fact that video and audio of casual conversations that are deemed problematic are punished just the same.

Deleting may not even be an option anymore. There’s several archival projects that save past tweets (the main one that comes to mind is archive.org).

They most likely don’t save every single tweet, however the chances are high that whatever you said and did on the internet in the past isn’t going away anytime soon.

Create multiple online identities.

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